OpenMoney
The status of this article is first-draft; it might contain some original ideas that have not gone through refinement process of getting feedback from the intended audience (you). Give me feedback to help me improve the reading experience for the next reader (15.3.2015). The Current System And It's Flaws Our economic activities are legally divided to consumers and corporations due to taxational reasons. Consumers have different responsibilities and corporations have other responsibilities. As an individual you get money either by working for your own company or a company owned by someone else. Because of taxation, we need accounting, which is why we have companies that pay salaries (income tax), sell services (VAT) and buy services (VAT). The government's do not care that much if the consumers give money to each other, but this is due to the nature of cash and how hard and impractical it would be to track cash transactions. Thus our money is based on bank money, which only exists in people's bank accounts; banks do not have enough cash money to pay the deposits, there is only 20% of cash money compared to deposit money. The money system is very complicated and regarding OpenMoney idea, this is all you need to know. Economic activity lives in networks of business transactions where corporations decide the prices of the transactions. This is not based on openness but instead every corporate node is legally bound to maximize it's profits from the business transactions. This way some corporations are in position of gatekeepers and they can take much more money in than any other actors. Many corporations try to manipulate the markets by advertising, taking advantage of globalization and abusing their sub-contractors. OpenMoney Movement OpenMoney is based upon the idea of voluntary donations and openness. In addition to traditional corporate transactions, every corporation participating to the OpenMoney donates regularly to it's subcontractors. Instead of maximizing the profits, OpenMoney companies also try to earn reputation with donations. In software business this would be easy (steal my start-up idea!): most of the software is built upon OpenSource-solutions, because they are easy to use. In order to discover and use these solutions, we have package managers, which tell the programs which software solutions to download. The package managers use configuration files that tell the dependencies (sub-contracting networks), every OpenSource-soultion has these files today. OpenMoney Companies In a sense the start-up idea generates the sub-contracting network with automation. Because every company is bound to accounting, this feature could be integrated to all the major OpenSource-accounting platforms. If both parties, the company and the sub-contractor, agree that they would like to be open about their cooperation, they could submit data about their co-operation to a cloud service, a social network of all business. When OpenMoney company receives a donation, it has set a keep-rate and the rest of the donation is redistributed to their sub-contractors. OpenMoney company will rate their sub-contractors on a scale of 1-5 which will weight the redistributed donations. Example: * OpenMoney company receives donation of 10,000€ * It keeps 30% of the pot and redistributes 7,000€ * It has rated three companies with ratings of 2, 3 and 5, so they would receive donations of 1,400€, 2,100€ and 3,500€. * When compared to the current system this would be very similar to voluntary Value Added Tax in transactional sense. The company can choose how open it is about the ratings; they could define that only sub-contractors rated with 4 or 5 will see the rating and others are unrated. This is to avoid negativeness: more carrot less stick. The ratings will be used to generate augmented intelligence services around sub-contracting networks. If a company has rated certain sub-contractor low, they will get recommendations about other sub-contractors, which have better reputation, pricing etc. I have designed a set of good mathematical models for this recommendation system. If you are interested contact me at LinkedIn. OpenMoney Employees One of the problems with current employment is that it does not encourage innovation and contribution, and the current system works against building long-term careers based upon competence instead of loyalty towards the employer. Similarly to OpenMoney companies rating sub-contractors, the employees could rate their co-workers. Then they would be paid small bonuses based on the ratings. In many countries companies have to pay taxes from the profits, but annual bonus to OpenMoney Employees might provide a good way to give it back to the employees instead (taxes will be paid from the salaries). The ratings shoud be very anonymous unless the company has very safe internal culture for complete openess. Companies could also donate to their past employees and advisery boards to encourage cooperation. If someone notices that some companies are donating more than others, it is a quite clear sign that you are appreciated, which will guide your voluntary contributions. This section was inspired by my past sub-contracting partner, which had similar ideology about how they deal with their internal procesess and how they build their business networks. OpenMoney: Reputation-Appreciation Network vs Price Competition Network In the current model of money, price is the only intelligent component, which can be tracked with accounting. Social networks have demonstrated the power of augmented intelligence based recommendation systems, which are fueled by tracking user transactions. Every day Facebook chooses top news for every one of their users from average of 1,500 stories. In order to do this well, they need good algorithms, but more importantly they need data about user interactions. This is why Facebook has likes, friends and shares. It also tracks how you interact with the Ticker and Chat components, how you browse your feed, which links you follow, where and with whom you have been tagged and where you use your mobile Facebook application. Some people are concerned about the privacy of such systems, but I see it as a great enablers. Targeted marketing is considered evil, but mass marketing is actually much more damaging, because it is not based on your actual behavior and interaction, instead it is based on who can pay most for advertisement slots, and that is very undemocratic way of spreading information about products. Mass media and advertisement is based on a price competition network, but social media marketing is based on reputation-appreciation networks, because besides the payments, the advertisements are directed to those who are most likely to click them voluntarily. In regular marketing we do not have this mechanism, which has driven the industry to the path of abusing principles of propaganda and manipulation. This is why you see women licking ice creams with orgasmetic faces on TV. This is why Axe has Anti-Stress Deodorant in their inventory. This is why all industrially produced food has a label, which claims for ethical ideas, when the production methods are unethical in reality. They try to hide the truth, feed you with ideas that are not scientifically sound at all; they want to be near your consciousness so that you will choose their product instead of thinking about buying the best product for you. Targeted marketing based on information about my pricate life -- which I voluntarily share at Facebook etc. -- has worked very well for me. When I got unemployed, Facebook immediately started recommending me interesting job opportunities. During writing this, Facebook also seems to have crawled this Wiki, because I shared the contents of this Wiki and they now recommended me several technical solution providers that are related to the Steal This Start-Up Idea concepts I have presented within this Wiki. You should be aware that the most vocal privacy concernists are often working for companies that are opinion leaders in the price competition network model (mass media). Don't be stupid in the Internet, but share your information as much as you can, because social networking sites based on augmented intelligence recommendations can help you towards your goals in life. I have made some guidelines for you about how you can start build your personal reputation-appreciation network for your own career. OpenMoney styled donations could generate data about the monetary value of your networks, which could be used for building entirely new ways of doing business and building careers.